This was a summer to remember. For many it will be a summer they never forget. Maybe it was a pool party or a wedding or a holiday for many, but without doubt for a large swathe of the human population it was a summer of extreme climatic conditions that will be etched into their living memories.

For me personally it was a really beautiful summer - I was extremely lucky to be teaching two permaculture courses in Portugal and Sweden, somehow I found myself as a facilitator at the Boom Festival in central Portugal where I had the good fortune to see one of the great environmental leaders of recent years, Ladonna Bravebull Allard.

Amidst this however I couldn’t get away from the stories from friends all over the world. Fires raged in Portugal, Sweden, Spain and California, and I was hearing stories and reading Facebook posts. In fact, a student on a PDC mentioned midway through August when we were teaching about rainwater harvesting that Brandeburg was pretty dry. As if to tempt fate, the news reported a serious fire the next day. In two locations where we have taught in Portugal fires raged close by (don’t worry, it’s 25km away, one of my friends texted. In the end they narrowly missed complete disaster) A close friend in Shasta, northern California said it was pretty smoky outside, and meanwhile in the Marina Alta (home to many friends and family), just south of Valencia, a forest fire raged for days. Close friends in Småland Sweden, though not directly hit by fire, were seriously affected by the worst drought in living memory - as a result they will be slaughtering half of their cattle in autumn for lack of feed through the winter. Though I haven’t heard personal accounts, much was written this summer about Australia’s drought. Lest we forget, Cape Town was running dry not too long ago either. "I had no idea it was so bad over there [in Europe]" my Californian friend messaged. In a way her text sums it up - not enough is being done to connect the dots.

It is safe to say that if you are experiencing climate anomalies where you live (and you are) then millions of people sharing your climate around the world are also experiencing the same climate weirding as you. If you are in a temperate zone and the forest is on fire, so are many others. If you are flooding, many other places are too. Climate extremes are more extreme and varied than they were, and they are set to get worse.

In Sweden it was not the driest part of the country that received the worst fires, and the nation needed the help of some the poorest EU countries to provide air support to extinguish the fires. In the driest part, where we have run three consecutive PDCs, the forests usually resplendent with blue and red berries were bare, and the perennials that carry them are scarred by the dry hot summer. The moose is threatened by climate change.

Meanwhile floods inundated, Karnataka, India. Friends in Coorg at the Rainforest Retreat shared stories of widespread devastation. On the international newswires we read about the flooding not far from there in Kerala, and in many parts of southern Europe. The flooding has wreaked devastation in human settlements all over the world.

That this should raise serious concern would be an understatement. In the age of rapid climate change there seems an undeniable fact - extremes are getting more extreme and increasing in frequency. At the same time we are consuming more energy as a species than ever before. The advent of data mining, for example, has accelerated energy use to a level that is very difficult to square with a looming global humanitarian crisis. At a time in which we desperately need to embrace degrowth, and cut out the cancer of the fossil fuel economy, we are in fact doing the opposite - Belt and Road should be three words everyone is aware of and be working to stop. The consequences of this are going to be disastrous.

The end of August left a harrowing vision - I was extremely fortunate to be gifted a trip to the glacier Mer de Glace in France. It’s a beautiful experience including a tram ride in an antique carriage up to a view point followed by a cable car ride down to the glacier and then another ride in a cable car to metal stairs that lead you down to the ice. It’s when you pass the signs indicating where the ice was in 1985 and then in 2015 further down that things start to get terrifying. The ice is disappearing at an absolutely alarming rate.

Wow! What better way to celebrate spring than to run a permaculture course! Our opening circle coincided with International Permaculture Day which fell on May 6, 2018, not long after Earth Day and just in time for International Compost Awareness Week. Lots to celebrate - so many wonderful movements around the world trying their level best to raise consciousness and get people working with, rather than against, mother nature. We celebrated International Permaculture Day with the release of a little music video which goes some way to introducing concepts in permaculture and provides an introductory booklist as well- check it out!

As always on our courses the content was peppered with excellent evening talks. We were very lucky to be invited into the off-grid house ofDave Dene in which he gave an account of his ongoing 6 year battle for water rights in Almeria province. Other evening talks included a presentation about bird misting with Dr. Richard Banham, a member of the British Trust for Ornithology. Dr Banham is doing important work to collect data on European bird populations. We also met Piotr Zwamy, who gave us an excellent presentation on his small business building and converting natural pools - a eco-business we predict will explode in the coming years in Europe.

Dave Dene’s talk just before the weekend set the tone for a water protest march on our day off alongside a super intensive olive plantation that is draining one of the aquifers of the region - almost all the aquifers in Almeria are in a poor state after years of systemic abuse. It provided a strong reminder, in the dreamy context of the PDC, that real issues persist.

In between time in front of the blackboard covering the standard syllabus, the course also featured several really fun practicals. We learnedhow to make natural shampoo, conditioner and toothpaste. We built A-frames to measure contour, shade structures to protect some of the annuals that had been planted late and planted out some garden beds, hot composted, did a spot of natural building, fermented, learned how to make kombucha, keffir and sauerkraut during a practical that was broadcast on Facebook live here: https://www.facebook.com/SunseedDesertTechnology/videos/1928022947209291/?hc_ref=ARTiFS1KUiJCresVwysO4MrGahH0AZ00PulxSCzdW-nRnG5ZJCUbnqeNlFel4tI2Bmw. We also enjoyed a fantastic edible plant walk with Adriana Garcia Aparicio, Sustainable Living Coordinator, who also gave an introductory talk to sociocracy. And when it was all just too much to take in, the surroundings afforded a natural healing respite - lovely walks into the desert, or a quick pop down to the natural pool, home to a wide diversity of species hardly seen anywhere else in the area - turtles, birds, dragonflies, snakes, lizards abound.

We were also very fortunate to have qi gong, yoga and contact dance sessions facilitated, as well as ad hoc flash mob dances, handstand jams and slackline sessions

I am sometimes left spinning after a course finished, totally inspired by the exciting information shared over the fortnight. This course was a two week jam of sharing, and there was just so much to learn. We are always very grateful to have such interesting and inspiring people on our courses. Here is a video of what was a very special two weeks:

​What a year it has been spreading the joy of permaculture with people around the world! We set up our teaching group, Circle Permaculture, to act as a catalyst between small farms/ ecological education sites and people who want to learn about permaculture. It's now been over three and half years of pulling these courses together, and we've come a long way!

What is permaculture? There's a very long answer to this question, but in a nutshell it is the design and implementation of sustainable living communities. In this uncertain age, it sounds like a reasonable thing to learn. Building resilience into our food systems is of growing importance. Pardon the pun.

In November we will be focusing on the plan for the expansion of forest gardens in charities, and hope to have some exciting news about this in the very near future. These projects are really exciting - maybe it is something you might personally want to get involved with. We were last with our pilot project at Odanadi in Mysore, India back in February - we simply cannot wait to see how it is growing! We started another small project with Divya Deepa as well, and look forward to seeing how the trees and the kids are getting on early in 2018. Have a look at the attached photo if you'd like your heartstrings pulled. Yields of forest gardens over time? Fun, Fuel, Fibre, Food, Fertility, Fodder, nature's 'Farmacy'!

As well as this, Wallace and I are in the process of producing a collection of songs celebrating the natural world and permaculture. We hope to have these up on the youtube channel soon!

In the meantime, we have posted a few videos of our 2017 courses up on the Circle Permaculture youtube channel. Here's one we made recently: Sunseed PDC Sep 2017 - check out those final designs!

Thank you to everyone who has supported the teaching group up to now.

In whatever part of the world you are working to make it just that little bit better, we wish you peace and happiness, remembering the words of Wendell Berry: "The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the planet but how to care for each of the planet's millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others."

Nestled in the the valley of Los Molinos del Rios Aguas, down the road from Sorbas in Almeria you will find Sunseed, a 'rolling community' and a centre for ecological education. We just completed our fourth Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course in the cold semi-arid climate there, and it was excellent. Again.

A wonderful two-weeks of learning and sharing with a great group that bonded beautifully. Aside from engaging lessons in the dome, the cave or in the meditation garden, we had several fun practicals including fermentation, mushroom propagation, hot composting, building with cob, potato planting and wild harvesting. Plus three movie evenings (one under the stars), a dinner talk on drone technology for contour mapping, and a talk on environmental activism... Oh yes, and a superb jam night with some excellent musicians. This course had a rhythmic flamenco theme throughout. Pretty fantastic! Topped off with high quality final designs and a memorable celebratory evening!

These 72-hour PDC's can be very intense, which is why the gorgeous surroundings provided a respite on the day off for a hike or a dip in the natural pool fed by the spring that is in peril. I encourage you to watch the following two documentaries to really understand how serious this is to these communities:

Thank you to Sunseed for hosting us once again for an epic permaculture adventure. We look forward to hearing how the participants of the course go on to apply what they learnt on the course. I know they left with many questions, and that several described 'shifts' during the course. Make no mistake - PDC's can be life-changing.